One of the more bizarre aspects of the last nine months of Snowden revelations is how top political officials in other nations have repeatedly demonstrated, or even explicitly claimed, wholesale ignorance about their nations\u2019 cooperation with the National Security Agency, as well as their own spying activities. This has led to widespread speculation about the authenticity of these reactions: Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be, in order to distance themselves from surveillance operations that became highly controversial once disclosed?<\/p>\n
In Germany, when Der Spiegel<\/i> first reported last June<\/a> that the NSA was engaged in mass spying aimed at the German population, Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior officials publicly expressed outrage \u2013 only for that paper to then reveal documents showing extensive cooperation<\/a> between the NSA and the German spy agency BND<\/a>.\u00a0In the Netherlands, a cabinet minister was forced to survive a no-confidence vote<\/a> after he admitted to having wrongfully attributed the collection of metadata from 1.8 million calls to the NSA rather than the Dutch spying agency.<\/p>\n In the UK, Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister and member of the national security council until 2012, insisted that ministers were in \u201cutter ignorance\u201d<\/a> about even the largest GCHQ spying program, known as Tempora, \u201cor its US counterpart, the NSA\u2019s Prism,\u201d as well as \u201cabout their extraordinary capability to hoover up and store personal emails, voice contact, social networking activity and even internet searches.\u201d<\/p>\n A similar controversy arose in the U.S., when the White House claimed that President Obama was kept unaware<\/a> of the NSA\u2019s surveillance of Merkel\u2019s personal cell phone and those of other allied leaders. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein claimed the same ignorance,<\/a> while an unnamed NSA source<\/a> told a German newspaper that the White House knew<\/a>.<\/p>\n A new NSA document published today<\/a> by The Intercept\u00a0<\/i>sheds considerable light on these questions. The classified document contains an internal NSA interview with an official from\u00a0the SIGINT Operations Group in NSA\u2019s Foreign Affairs Directorate. Titled \u201cWhat Are We After with Our Third Party Relationships? \u2014 And What Do They Want from Us, Generally Speaking?\u201d, the discussion explores the NSA\u2019s cooperative relationship with its surveillance partners. Upon being asked whether\u00a0political shifts within those nations affect the NSA\u2019s relationships, the SIGINT official explains why such changes generally have no effect: because only a handful of military officials in those countries are aware of the spying activities. Few, if any, elected leaders have any knowledge of the surveillance.<\/p>\n Are our foreign intelligence relationships usually insulated from short-term political ups and downs, or not?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n (S\/\/SI\/\/REL) For a variety of reasons, our intelligence relationships are rarely disrupted by foreign political perturbations, international or domestic. First, we are helping our partners address critical intelligence shortfalls, just as they are assisting us. Second, in many of our foreign partners\u2019 capitals, few senior officials outside of their defense-intelligence apparatuses are witting to any SIGINT connection to the U.S.\/NSA <\/b>[emphasis added].<\/p>\n The official adds that there \u201care exceptions, both on the positive and negative sides.\u201d He gives two examples: \u201cFor instance, since the election of a pro-American president, one European partner has been much more open to providing information on their own capabilities and techniques, in hope of raising our intelligence collaboration to a higher level. Conversely, another of our partnerships has stalled, due largely to that country\u2019s regional objectives not being in synch with those of the U.S.\u201d In general, however, many of these \u201crelationships have, indeed, spanned several decades\u201d and are unaffected by changes due to elections, in large part because the mere existence of these activities is kept from the political class.<\/p>\n The implications for democratic accountability are clear. In an October Guardian<\/i> op-ed<\/a>, Huhne, the British former cabinet minister, noted that \u201cwhen it comes to the secret world of\u00a0GCHQ\u00a0and the [NSA], the depth of my \u2018privileged information\u2019 has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden\u00a0to the Guardian.\u201d Detailing what appears to be the systematic attempt to keep political officials in the dark, he wrote:\u00a0\u201dThe Snowden revelations put a giant question mark into the middle of our surveillance state. It is time our elected representatives insisted on some answers before destroying the values we should protect.\u201d<\/p>\n The dangers posed by a rogue national security state, operating in secret and without the knowledge of democratically elected officials, have long been understood. After serving two terms as president, Dwight D. Eisenhower famously worried in his 1961 Farewell Address<\/a>\u00a0about the accumulated power of the \u201cconjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,\u201d warning of what he called the \u201cgrave implications\u201d of \u201cthe acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.\u201d He urged citizens: \u201cThe potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.\u201d<\/p>\n A secret GCHQ memo, reported by the Guardian\u00a0<\/i>in October,<\/a> demonstrates that the agency\u2019s primary motive for concealing its surveillance activities is that disclosure could trigger what it called\u00a0\u201ddamaging public debate,\u201d as well as legal challenges throughout Europe. Those fears became realized when, in the wake of Snowden revelations,\u00a0privacy lawsuits against the agency<\/a> were filed in Europe, GCHQ officials were forced to publicly testify for the first time<\/a> before Parliament, and an EU Parliamentary inquiry earlier this year\u00a0concluded NSA\/GCHQ activities were likely illegal<\/a>. The British agency was also concerned about \u201cdamage to partner relationships if sensitive information were accidentally released in open court,\u201d given that such disclosures could make citizens in other countries aware, for the first time, of their government\u2019s involvement in mass surveillance.<\/p>\n The revelations of a global system of blanket surveillance have come as a great surprise to hundreds of millions of citizens around the world whose governments were operating these systems without their knowledge. But they also came as a surprise to many high-ranking political officials in countries around the world who were previously ignorant of those programs, a fact which the NSA seems to view as quite valuable in ensuring that its surveillance activities remain immune from election outcomes and democratic debate.<\/p>\n Document published with this article:<\/i><\/p>\n